North America

CLINT, Texas (AP) — Lawmakers on Friday were calling for swift change after reports this week of more than 250 infants, children and teens being held inside a windowless Border Patrol station, struggling to care for each other with inadequate food, water and sanitation.

It’s a scene that is being repeated at other immigration facilities overwhelmed with too many migrant children and nowhere to put them.

WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s a perilous time to have temps running the Pentagon.

President Donald Trump’s brinkmanship with Iran is on the boil, spilling beyond diplomacy to a planned air attack on Iran that Trump said he ordered, then pulled back at least for now. This, as the U.S. undertakes an unusual troop deployment to the Mexican border , tends its nearly two-decade-old war in Afghanistan and grapples with stalled talks with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States is blacklisting five Chinese organizations involved in supercomputing with military-related applications, citing national security as justification for denying its Asian geopolitical rival access to critical U.S. technology.

The move Friday by the U.S. Commerce Department could complicate talks next week between President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, aimed at de-escalating a trade dispute between the world’s two biggest economies.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Friday threw out the murder conviction and death sentence for a black man in Mississippi because of a prosecutor’s efforts to keep African Americans off the jury. The defendant already has been tried six times and now could face a seventh trial.

The removal of black prospective jurors deprived inmate Curtis Flowers of a fair trial, the court said in a 7-2 decision written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Friday he abruptly called off the swiftly planned military strikes on Iran because the likely deaths of 150 Iranians would have been so out of proportion to the shootdown of an unmanned American surveillance drone. He also indicated he still hopes for talks with Iranian leaders rather than any escalation of military conflict.

“I am in no hurry,” he wrote on Twitter, adding that increasingly severe sanctions meant to push Iran to the nuclear negotiating table are “biting” the Iranian economy.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The planes were ready — their deadly cargo poised for delivery within a half-hour.

President Donald Trump had been given a series of options Thursday night on how to respond to Iran’s downing of an unmanned American surveillance drone. Senior military advisers zeroed in on a plan to launch strikes on a trio of sites within Iran, and it was up to Trump to give the final go-ahead.

If the planes took off, Trump later recounted to NBC, they would soon be at “a point where you wouldn’t turn back or couldn’t turn back.”

SAN FRANCISCO, June 20 (Xinhua) -- A U.S. federal court of appeal Thursday ruled that U.S. President Donald Trump's government can go ahead with a policy that prohibits American women from receiving abortion operations at federally-funded clinics.

A three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco allowed the U.S. government to enforce a controversial rule to ban Title X recipients from performing abortion as a method of family planning.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on The United States and Iran’s tensions over the shootdown of a massive U.S. drone (all times local):

8 a.m.

European Council President Donald Tusk is denying that the EU has been too passive in its response to rising tensions between the United States and Iran.

After chairing a summit of EU leaders in Brussels Friday, Tusk said that “sometimes it’s better not to intervene. The biggest problems in our history (were) always provoked by too active politics, not too passive.”

21 June 2019; MEMO: The United States yesterday added Saudi Arabia to a blacklist of countries that do not play a sufficient role in fighting human trafficking.

According to the US’ annual report on human trafficking, Saudi Arabia has failed to prevent large scale violations committed against its foreign labour force, Lebanese newspaper the Daily Star reported.

SAN DIEGO (AP) — When the prosecution called a special forces medic to testify, they expected him to bolster their murder case against a decorated Navy SEAL accused of stabbing an Islamic State fighter in his care.

Corey Scott delivered on that count, saying Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher had unexpectedly plunged a knife into the adolescent detainee after treating his wounds in 2017 in Iraq.